Video and image ads in search listings would have to be incremental and evolutionary, say Google executives.
Sundar Pichai, Google's director of product management, and Nicholas
Fox, Google's group business product manager, addressed the possibility of bundling image or video ads into Google's Universal Search. The discussion took place Thursday at the Citigroup Technology
Conference in New York.
Fox says integrating video or image ads into sponsored search results is an option that has come up in internal discussions, since search ads are there to give users
information that is most relevant to their query. "In many cases that's a text ad," Fox says. "In some cases, it may be an image, a video, or something else. But the risk is not showing something
garish or flashy, because users would become blind to the ads and it would hurt the business long-term."
He gives the example of a local butcher: A video with shots of fresh meat and the overall
store experience would be more enticing than a 10-word text ad. More value is provided to both the consumer and advertiser. Currently there is more thinking than action around the issue at Mountain
View, and for potential experiments, Google will proceed "cautiously and slowly," Fox says.
According to Pichai, "the images and video ads you see today on content networks are not what will
work. They won't carry over well." Any steps Google makes will have to be "incremental and evolutionary."
In terms of the overall Universal Search experience, Pichai acknowledges that the search
giant has a ways to go before every search yields blended results.
"We've started triggering [Universal Search] on certain queries, but not for all," Pichai says. "But we do have a good base to
measure user experience and satisfaction." While Google does not break down or disclose details in terms of percentage of click-throughs or actual number queries, the feature has been "well received."
When asked why Universal Search wasn't rolled out much sooner, given Google's tech-intensive culture, Pichai says that solving the three challenges of managing the infrastructure, determining
relevance ranking and keeping the user experience clean and unchanged took a few years.
"People don't see the differences on the surface, because our goal is to keep the user experience easy,"
Pichai says. "But Universal Search is still in a nascent stage."